Monday, February 2, 2009

Reading List: The Ballad of Carl Drega

I was about write “the author is the most prominent
libertarian writing for the legacy media today”, but
in fact, to my knowledge, he is the only genuine
libertarian employed by a major metropolitan newspaper
(the Las Vegas Review-Journal), where he writes
editorials
and columns, the latter syndicated to a number of other
newspapers. This book, like his earlier
Send In The Waco Killers,
is a collection of these writings, plus letters from readers
and replies, along with other commentary. This volume covers
the period from 1994 through the end of 2001, and contains his
columns reacting to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001,
which set him at odds with a number of other prominent libertarians.

Suprynowicz is not one of those go-along, get-along people
L. Neil Smith
describes as “nerf libertarians”. He
is a hard-edged lover of individual liberty, and defends it
fiercely in all of its aspects here. As much of the content
of the book was written as columns to be published weekly,
collected by topic rather than chronologically, it
may occasionally seem repetitive if you read the whole book
cover to cover. It is best enjoyed a little at a time, which is
why it did not appear here until years after I started to read it.
If you're a champion of liberty who is prone to hypertension,
you may want to increase your blood pressure medication
before reading some of the stories recounted here. The
author's prognosis for individual freedom in the U.S. seems
to verge upon despair; in this I concur, which is why I no longer
live there, but still it's depressing for people everywhere. Chapter 9
(pp. 441–476) is a collection of the “Greatest
Hits from the Mailbag”, a collection of real mail (and
hilarious replies) akin to Fourmilab's own
Titanium Cranium Awards.

This book is now out of print, and used copies currently sell at
almost twice the original cover price.